Multiple 301 redirects and old site content appearing in Google results
-
I have found that for some Google searches the old version of the site on a completely different domain is appearing on page one of the results, while the newer site is only on page 3.
The old site is redirecting to the new site with a 301 redirect, however there is also an additional redirect on the new site to force SSL.
Despite this when you view the Google cache of the result that appears in Google the content of the page is still the old site. Is this normal or is Google not following the chain of 301 redirects?
Edit: I just found out that downloading the page by right clicking a link and clicking download rather than viewing it in a browser leads to the old site appearing and the 301 redirect not being followed.
-
Thank you Amelia
-
With 4 that is possible, but before you kill everything off, do give my suggestion a whirl to see if that has an impact. However, that also depends on how much of a rush you are in to see a resolution - it could take a little time until Google gets around to resolving it.
Feel free to PM me if you would like me to take a peek at anything.
-Andy
-
I see Andy has also suggested removing via webmaster tools. And he was smart enough to remember fetch as google too! Andy, you rock!
-
Why redirect twice? I'd redirect to the https version from the old site/pages instead of going through two loops...
Also, did you do the change of address thing in webmaster tools? You can also remove urls from the index through webmaster tools, but I've only ever done this once when our IT guy f-ed up our dns settings so can't really help you much though it was pretty straight-forward if I remember rightly.
Good luck
-
Thanks Andy - I know it's difficult without the sites so I appreciate your efforts! We've checked the 301s and are pretty sure they're implemented OK. I suspect that we just have too many of them. 2 or 3 redirects in a chain seems to be OK according to Matt Cutts but we've got 4 and I reckon Google is ignoring them altogether and just indexing the original content.
-
No problem.
What I was going to look for was the chain of 301 and make sure there were no errors in how these were implemented.
You could also use Webmaster Tools to suggest removal of old pages, then use Fetch as Google, to help speed up the spidering process.
It's a little awkward without seeing the sites I'm afraid.
-Andy
-
Unfortunately I can't post links since we're under a confidentiality agreement with the customer that limits what we can do. Sorry! I know it would be a lot better with URLs but we just can't do it...
-
Do you have example links from both sites that I could take a look at please Michael?
-Andy
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
301 Redirects for Multiple Language Sites in htaccess File
Hi everyone, I have a site on a subdomain that has multiple languages set up at the domain level: https://mysite.site.com, https://mysite.site.fr , https://mysite.site.es , https://mysite.site.de , etc. We are migrating to a new subdomain and I am trying to create 301 redirects within the htaccess file, but I am a bit lost on how to do this as it seems you have to go from a relative url to an absolute - which would be fine if I was only doing this for the english site, but I'm not. It doesn't seem like I can go from absolute url to an absolute url - but I could be wrong. I am new to editing the htaccess file - so I could definitely use some advice here. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amberprata0 -
How do I best handle Duplicate Content on an IIS site using 301 redirects?
The crawl report for a site indicates the existence of both www and non-www content, which I am aware is duplicate. However, only the www pages are indexed**, which is throwing me off. There are not any 'no-index' tags on the non-www pages and nothing in robots.txt and I can't find a sitemap. I believe a 301 redirect from the non-www pages is what is in order. Is this accurate? I believe the site is built using asp.net on IIS as the pages end in .asp. (not very familiar to me) There are multiple versions of the homepage, including 'index.html' and 'default.asp.' Meta refresh tags are being used to point to 'default.asp'. What has been done: 1. I set the preferred domain to 'www' in Google's Webmaster Tools, as most links already point to www. 2. The Wordpress blog which sits in a /blog subdirectory has been set with rel="canonical" to point to the www version. What I have asked the programmer to do: 1. Add 301 redirects from the non-www pages to the www pages. 2. Set all versions of the homepage to redirect to www.site.org using 301 redirects as opposed to meta refresh tags. Have all bases been covered correctly? One more concern: I notice the canonical tags in the source code of the blog use a trailing slash - will this create a problem of inconsistency? (And why is rel="canonical" the standard for Wordpress SEO plugins while 301 redirects are preferred for SEO?) Thanks a million! **To clarify regarding the indexation of non-www pages: A search for 'site:site.org -inurl:www' returns only 7 pages without www which are all blog pages without content (Code 200, not 404 - maybe deleted or moved - which is perhaps another 301 redirect issue).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
301 Redirected url to new subdomain, now the rank appears to be completely gone...
In an attempt to not feel bad for not blogging, I set up a new subdomain on my site to have a "coming soon" style page and "best of" section for my blog and video show properties. All the pages on the relaunch subdomain are done in Unbounce. http://relaunch.tommy.ismy.name The idea was that I would then take the pages on my regular domain, and one by one create landing pages that test out new design ideas (instead of going into full production web design) and redirect the traffic from the top ranked pages to the new, redesigned pages. At first, I set up the 301 through a plugin in wordpress and for the first week or so it was great. As far as I know, I did set my canonical tags up properly on that page too. However, just a couple days ago, I wasn't getting the same traffic, and my top ranked keyword that accounts for over half my traffic is nowhere to be found in at least the first 15 pages of search results. Which stinks, because I've maintained that rank for well over 2 years 😞 Clearly, something I did wasn't liked by Google, and I wonder, what did I do "wrong" and is there anything I could do to get that rank back?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Thomas_m_walker0 -
301 Redirect To Another 301 Redirect
Hi, We have a client with an old domain that they want to redirect to their primary domain. They also have a few older domains pointing to the old domain. Do you recommend leaving them as redirects that point to the old domain? This will create a redirect to a redirect situation. Or, is it better to go ahead and redirect those older domains to the primary one's, removing one layer of redirect? Thank you! Jessie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JessieT0 -
What if a 301 redirect is removed?
Suppose the following scenarios after a 301 redirects from source URL to targent URL is removed. 1. If source URL raises a 404 error, will target URL retained the link juice previously passed from source URL? 2. If source URL starts to show different content than what is showing on target URL, will the previously passed link juice be credited back to the source URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bull1350 -
Multiple 301 Redirects for the Same Page
Hi Mozzers, What happens if I have a trail of 301 redirects for the same page? For example,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
SiteA.com/10 --> SiteA.com/11 --> SiteA.com/13 --> SiteA.com/14 I know I lose a little bit of link juice by 301 redirecting.
The question is, would the link juice look like this for the example above? 100% --> 90% --> 81% -->72.9%
Or just 100% -----------------------------------------> 90% Does this link juice refer to juice from inbound links or links between internal pages on my site? Thanks!0 -
Embed Same Video On Multiple Pages or 301 Redirect Into 1?
I have 3 pages that rank VERY well for related terms such as: -How to get widgets -How to become a widget -Getting widgets -etc. I am incorporating a video on the topic and rewriting much of the content on the site. I am wondering if it is wise to 301 redirect all 3 pages to 1 page that has the new/better video content or if I should leave the old content that is ranking well and embed the video on the top of each. The anal retentive side of me wants a nice new site structure and 1 powerful page. However, if the 3 pages are currently ranking (sometimes 2 pages in the same top 10 results), should I mess with what is working? Ultimately my goal is to increase the avg time on site as these 3 pages are top traffic pages for the site. However, they do not convert at all, as they are for a product we don't offer. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
Duplicate content on ecommerce sites
I just want to confirm something about duplicate content. On an eCommerce site, if the meta-titles, meta-descriptions and product descriptions are all unique, yet a big chunk at the bottom (featuring "why buy with us" etc) is copied across all product pages, would each page be penalised, or not indexed, for duplicate content? Does the whole page need to be a duplicate to be worried about this, or would this large chunk of text, bigger than the product description, have an effect on the page. If this would be a problem, what are some ways around it? Because the content is quite powerful, and is relavent to all products... Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creode0